Share:

Dezeen Music Project: discoloured images from children's science journals have been collaged together by videographer Ewan Jones Morris to create this music video for London band Fanfarlo's Cell Song (+ movie).

Fanfarlo approached Ewan Jones Morris to create the video for their latest album after seeing his previous work, and offered him the choice of which song to create the visuals.

"They were exploring a lot of sci-fi concepts with their new album," Jones Morris told Dezeen. "I chose Cell Song as much for the subject as anything else and the story of the video grew from that."

Imagery zooms in and out, showing sections of life forms from microscopic detail, through cellular and tissue levels up to a more familiar, human scale.

During the video, figures and objects transform into strange creatures and the singers' faces pop-up in bubbles and on screens of vintage TVs.

The director created the animation from images of children's science magazines from the 1960s.

"I collect a few different 'knowledge' magazines aimed at children, most of them printed in the 1960s – back when kids were into science, cross sections of fungus or who invented the sewing machine," Jones Morris told Dezeen.

"There's never a shortage of cell diagrams in biology text books," he added.

"I used to spend hours looking through these kinds of books as a kid, and I always imagined something beyond what was actually happening in the pictures, made connections between completely different images," said Jones Morris. "That's what I'm recreating, that process of collaging with my brain as I scanned through those books."

The visuals were assembled in Photoshop and each frame – 12 per second – was printed out onto paper using an "unreliable" inkjet machine.

"I try and avoid more complicated software because I want to keep everything 2D and a bit wonky," said Jones Morris.

He tampered with the ink cartridges so the print becomes uneven, then each page was photographed slightly crumpled or wet to distort the pictures.

Cell Song features on Fanfarlo's album Let's Go Extinct released in February 2014.